By Laura Slover
As formative assessment scholar Dylan Wiliam defines it, assessments for learning “use evidence of student learning to adapt teaching and learning, or instruction, to meet student needs.” This is in contrast to assessments of learning, which are typically used to evaluate a student’s mastery of content but not to take specific action in the classroom as a result of it.
As a former teacher, I saw first-hand how well-crafted assessments inform teaching and learning. I spent hours designing assessments that would provide me with information about student strengths and weaknesses and help me determine what next steps to take with individual students, groups of students, or entire classrooms. So, I am convinced that assessments can serve as a powerful tool for learning – particularly when they are embedded in a strong curriculum and accompanied by quality instruction.
Elements of High-Quality Assessment for Learning
Assessments for learning serve as an important feedback loop for teachers throughout the school year. If designed well, they can allow a teacher to efficiently gather information about what students know and can do. They can provide important feedback about the effectiveness of particular instructional strategies and can signal whether certain topics need to be revisited to address misunderstandings. They can also help inform teachers when students are ready to go deeper by exploring a topic of great interest to them.
The key here is “if designed well.” Assessments for learning can take many forms, but, to provide actionable, accurate information that teachers can use to adapt their instruction, they need to be effective assessment tools. In my experience, creating and using high quality assessments for learning requires a few key things:
If this sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. Creating strong alignment between standards, curriculum, assessment, and instruction is challenging work and requires time, support, and ongoing opportunities for professional collaboration.
Assessment for Learning in Practice
Given this is challenging work, where should educators start? My colleagues Bonnie Hain and Jim Mirabelli recently wrote in a post for Learning Forward about one promising approach: using Evidence-Centered Design (ECD) to create assessments for learning that help chart an effective teaching path.
ECD is a process that can help educators concretely describe what student mastery of content standards looks like and create tasks that give students the opportunity to show their level of understanding and where they may need more specific support. When students respond to assessment questions or tasks designed using ECD, educators can collect concrete information on what students know and can do with greater clarity about what additional steps may be needed for students to meet expectations. With quality assessments, we have greater confidence that the judgments we are making about next steps instruction are truly in student’s best interests.
This approach helps address one of the greatest needs I hear from educators – how to make sense of information from locally-administered assessments and use it to differentiate instruction. Using ECD helps facilitate that process by closely connecting the evidence about student learning – i.e. the assessment data – to the desired learning outcomes. Using those desired outcomes as the starting point can help teachers make rapid improvements to their formative assessments – thereby helping them gather better data about student learning to inform their instruction.
If I had had these skills when I was a classroom teacher, I would have been able to craft stronger assessments and get better information about my students’ needs. As CEO of CenterPoint, my mission is to help educators across the country gain those skills so they can accelerate learning for every student.
Laura Slover is the CEO of CenterPoint Education Solutions and a former English teacher.
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